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Saturday, February 26, 2005

TERROR OF THE AUTONS

Loki, yesterday, on "Showroom Dummies": people who seem to have have forgotten the lines from their own Life Scripts.

So, it seems almost appropriate that today's paper should run a teaser photo from the forthcoming new Doctor Who series featuring The Doctor scrapping with an Auton: the original, never-bettered, sinisteranimated shop-mannequins...

LEMMINGMANIA

So, perhaps we should stop viewing Ikea as a corporate entity, and approach it from a behavouralist p.o.v.

I'm wondering whether Ikea (as a phenomenon) has arisen in response to some sort of behavoural meme; that maybe an inate , half-forgotten, retro-mammalian herding instinct (that occasionally manifests itself as Flash Mobs...) requires some sort of shared, semi-conscious Cultural Vacuum: a generic/non-specific Place To Go that exists outside of Mating/Reproduction Rituals, etc...though I'm not sure why, from the stand-point of evolutionary advantage, such a place should need to exist on our Psychic Radar, except as a residue. Perhaps then, we as a race, still do have an atrophied need to herd, and companies such as Ikea have evolved to occupy nodes on our sunday-afternoon neural migration-maps.

Scary to think that Business Park Britain might have subconsciously sprung-up as a response to some vague, hard-wired, back-brain desire to do nothing-in-particular...I mean, it's not like we actually relax in these places; in fact, they seem to exist to purely pass some time when we feel an inexplicable sense of low-level aggitation. Buying stuff in these places feels like a sham; a pretext of some sort.

And the Psychoarchitecture of Retail Parks is kinda scary too: Big Sheds that resemble nothing more than, well, barns...